And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

by Meaghan O'Connell

perfect birth, but she didn’t give up and get the epidural like I did. Her baby, when he finally came, came barreling out of her so quickly and so traumatically, she got an extremely debilitating fourth-degree tear. She’d been seeing a pelvic-floor therapist, a godsend, and was healing and progressing, but sex was still something she couldn’t quite contemplate. She couldn’t ride her bike or go running. For the first few weeks, she couldn’t even sit down. Despite all that, she went back to work when the baby was six weeks old. She didn’t have a choice. “It was really dark,” she says. “No kidding.” “I imagined all these things I’d do on my maternity leave.” “Ha.” “Exactly.” Talking to her, I realize that when I replay my own labor in my head, a sort of compulsive Monday-morning quarterbacking I can’t stop doing, I imagine that if I had only “stuck it out” and had the vaginal birth I aspired to, everything would have gone perfectly. But there are all kinds of ways for things to go badly.